Next Move Festival of Modern Dance @ Proctors, 3/30/12

SCHENECTADY — The first night of the second annual Next Move Festival of Modern Dance at Proctors explored two hot-button issues of the 21st century: technology and climate change.

The New York City-based husband-and-wife team of Myrna Packer and Art Bridgman presented a low-tech appetizer followed by a high-tech main course, exploring similar themes. In “Carried Away,” the pair plays with shadows in simple yet magical ways; as they move between a swath of red fabric and the light source behind it, we see their silhouettes morph on the cloth screen. They have lots of fun with scale (controlled, of course, by how close they are to the light source); often, as they dance together, one appears to be nearly twice the other’s size.

“Under the Skin” pumps up the volume, incorporating pre-recorded video and time-delay software as well as live dancing. Sometimes the two dance in front of rapidly scrolling projections of letters and symbols, their bodies covered in moving images. In one clever section, they wear white bell-shaped skirts that serve as small screens. When video of her lower half is projected onto his skirt, he becomes half-Bridgman, half-Packer; then he lifts his skirt over his head, revealing his own legs, topped by a projected image of her torso and head. It’s brilliantly timed and executed, as is the wonderful section in which a dozen copies of the pair take the stage—the real ones, dressed in white; two doubles projected onto their white costumes; and a handful of additional duplicates projected on the screen behind them.

The second half of the program was devoted to a new work, “Tide,” by the Philadelphia company Scrap Performance Group, codirected by another married couple, Myra Bazell and Madison Cario. The piece is a dance/theater work with too much theater and not enough dance. An examination of humans’ relationship with the natural world, “Tide” relies heavily on too-obvious phrases like “Precious time … I’ve wasted it” and “There was silence and apathy and, in the end, nothing.” A one-woman-chorus-slash-narrator, played by Bazell, is odd and disturbing in a familiar, “Mad Max” sort of way.

It’s a shame, because when the five women (Marie Brown, Lindsay Browning, Katharine Livingston, Shannon Murphy, Eleanor Goudie-Averill and Cario) do get to dance without interruption, the movement viscerally conveys their connection, confusion, fear and brokenness. Their sisterhood, as they journey through what is left of their world, is beautifully palpable in their lovely lifts and partnering, and even in the way the close physical contact they maintain sometimes crosses over into irritation and frustration. Bazell and Cario should have trusted their choreography and their dancers to carry the piece—and its subject—to a place more powerful than words.